Published: August 19, 2007 10:54 pm      

PETS: Rottweiler adopts orphaned kittens as her own

It was a week of mixed blessings for Bonnie Donaldson.  Her cat, Lulu, was struck and killed by a car on Aug. 5, a few houses down from her Chestnut Street home. Lulu, a beloved calico, was hit while Donaldson’s 8-year-old granddaughter watched.

Donaldson said the driver who hit Lulu drove away without stopping.

“The neighbors said it looked like he had swerved right towards her and hit her on purpose,” she said.

Worse yet, Lulu left behind a litter of week-old kittens who needed their mother’s milk.

Donaldson and her son, David Stanley, took to feeding the kittens by bottle and formula to fill the void.

Meanwhile, the family’s 3-year-old rottweiler, Jade, took the death of her friend Lulu to heart.

“She’d been whining and panting a lot,” Donaldson said. “I think she knows she’s gone.”

The 80-pound dog apparently decided to help ease the kittens’ loss the only way she could.

“She kept sitting outside my bedroom door whining and whining,” Donaldson said. “I let her in, and she ran right there and picked (the kittens) up out of the basket and laid down. I was looking, and I saw her nipple, and I said, ‘You can’t be milking them. There’s no way.’ ”

Sure enough, Jade — who has never had puppies of her own — was nursing the tiny kittens, hiding them protectively underneath her.

“I was blown away,” Donaldson said. “I thought, ‘This can’t be happening.’ ”

Donaldson and Stanley said Jade grew up in the home with several cats from the time she was a puppy.

“She thinks she’s a cat,” she said. “Lulu was her baby. You’d say, ‘Where’s your baby?’ and she’d run all over the house looking for her.”

When Lulu gave birth to her kittens, Jade alerted the family that they had been born.

“She was walking back and forth, back and forth,” Donaldson said. “(Lulu) had them in the basement, and we didn’t know.”

After the kittens were born, Jade lay by their bed “like she was baby-sitting.”

Donaldson has consulted fellow pet-lovers, none of whom have ever heard of a dog nursing a cat, especially a dog who’s never had puppies, she said.

“She’s never been bred,” Donaldson said. “She’s never even been near a male dog.”

Unfortunately, Jade’s zeal to keep the kittens fed was unfortunately too much for one of the kittens, who was crushed by the 80-pound dog. Stanley said they found the small black kitten dead the next morning.

Donaldson said they will try to find homes for the remaining kittens, though she is considering keeping one of them, a calico who looks like her mother.

The kittens cry for food every two hours, and Jade lies with them on the floor, cleaning them off and nursing them. They can’t get all their nutrition from her, though, so Donaldson and Stanley are still feeding them with bottles to make up the difference.

Contact reporter April Amadon at 439-9222, ext. 6251.